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Revision as of 11:37, 1 December 2011

This area of the wiki is for those who wish to assist by reporting non-working wireless drivers or by testing new drivers. Both reporting and testing provides valuable information to the developers of wireless drivers. It also helps to ensure that PC-BSD and FreeBSD provide support for the wireless devices used by their users.

This page contains three tables:

Table 1: devices in this table don't have a FreeBSD driver yet. If your device requires you to run the ndisgen script to convert a Windows driver to a FreeBSD driver module, it belongs in this table. Such devices use ndis(4) as their driver name. The goal of this table is to determine which devices need a native FreeBSD driver.

Table 2: devices in this table already have a FreeBSD driver, but there are problems with the driver e.g. certain features are unavailable or the driver crashes. The goal of this table is to provide information to developers so the driver can be fixed. This means that you should reference any existing PRs or other URLs containing a description of the problem. If a PR does not exist, consider submitting one; information on how to submit a useful PR can be found at Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports.

Table 3: devices in this table have a working FreeBSD driver, making it a quick reference to determine if a device is supported. If your device works and is not in the table, take a minute to create a wiki login account and add an entry for your device.

If your wireless device is not supported and is not listed in Table 1, please create a wiki account and add it. However, do a little bit of research first:

Perform a Google search for the name of the device and the word FreeBSD (for example, "freebsd broadcom 5709"). This should give you a good idea if the driver already exists--and if so, the name of the driver--or if other FreeBSD users have had problems getting their device to work.

If you are not sure of the name and model of your internal device, try this command: pciconf -lv | grep -i wireless. If the device is USB, try usbconfig dump_all_config_desc.

If a FreeBSD driver does not exist, download a Windows driver for the device, run the interactive script ndisgen as the superuser, and see if you can successfully use the generated driver module. Add the results for your architecture (i386 or amd64) to Table 1.

Note: ndisgen currently does not support the NDIS 6.X API. In practical terms, this means that you should only try it on XP and 2003 drivers. Make sure you download and try to convert the correct driver for your architecture (32 or 64 bit). If you would like to help test the most recent version of ndisgen, follow these instructions.

Note to iwi(4) users: work is ongoing to improve this driver. Please see Bernhard Schmidt's iwi wiki if you are interested in testing these changes.

Table 1: Wireless Devices Needing Drivers: Does ndisgen Work for this Device?

Device Name

i386

amd64

Comments

BCM4310

NO

BCM4313

YES

NO

Use the Windows 95 or 98 driver.

RTL8185

YES

YES

Try Me driver instead of XP. Use XP driver version 1.10. Should be about 280 KiB in size. Must manually load driver. Placing it in /boot/loader.conf did not initialize device. As far as I have tested it fully works. You may have to manually configure it as well. The graphical network manager did not work for me. (More info in discussion). Just finished setting up amd64 system. XP64 driver version 1.10 does work (using it now). Follow same procedures as i386 driver.

Table 3 provides a handy resource for checking to see if your wireless driver is known to work on FreeBSD and PC-BSD. Devices should be added alphabetically (then numerically). Only add devices that you have successfully used (e.g. don't add devices that "should" work according to the driver man page).

Works in 8.1 or later, only station, adhoc-demo and monitor mode is currently supported. Must install net/bwn-firmware-kmod port. Not the bwi-firmware-kmod. 8.1 users may need to modify /usr/src/sys/kern/subr_firmware.c to read FIRMWARE_MAX 50 and recompile their kernel; this is not necessary in 8.2 or higher.